So, you have probably read a dozen articles or seen a handful of clips on Youtube about how to use DigitalOcean / Amazon AWS / Google Cloud / Azure / PaperSpace or some other cloud server to mine bitcoins (or some other cryptocurrency coins) and you probably already know it’s not profitable. I know that too but still I wanted to experiment with that a bit 🙂

Many cloud providers do not allow mining on their computers since these are mostly distributed systems so they aren’t happy when some user is using a resource at full power all the time. So, once they find out that someone is mining on their hardware they usually shut these servers down or even close accounts (rarely, but it can happen!) Finding that someone is using their hardware for mining is also quite easy since the CPU will be running at 100% all the time. So it will stand out from normal usage that’s probably nowhere close to that.

Also, mining Bitcoins with CPU today is not even theoretically possible now so don’t waste your time with that. On the other side there are some alternative crypto currencies that are made to be mined only with CPU and most of these use cryptonote algorithm. If you’re going to be mining with the CPU – then simply mine these. Currently, Bytecoin, Monero and Dashcoin are the most popular. For the purpose of this post I’ll use Bytecoin (BCN).

This experiment has two goals: first one is to install everything and start mining with just one command and second is to try and limit the CPU usage so and try and stay under the radar…